This blog is about various boat and environment related topics that I care to comment on. First and foremost, this blog is about skin on frame boats, their construction and use, as well as paddle and other stuff related to skin boat use.

Friday, November 22, 2013

What Killed the Kayak? Aleut Version - Akutan, Alaska

Akutan, Alaska is an island in the Aleutians and once a place where people paddled kayaks as a part of making a living. Nowadays the biggest industry on the island is a fish processing plant. Trawlers scrape the bottom of the ocean for fish and bring them to the processing plant to have them turned into product suitable for sale in the lower 48. The Aleut population of the island actually has very little to do with the fish plant other than extracting rent from them. Still, the kayak as a tool for hunting, fishing and whaling is no longer in use.

The fish plant at Akutan.
Photo courtesy of Kurt Schmidt

The big rusty things are doors on a trawl. Picture a net like a large sock with one of these doors on either side sliding along the bottom and funneling fish into the sock. Nothing escapes.
Human added for scale.

Iron weights hold the bottom of the net close to the bottom of the ocean.

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About Me

I like to look into old and mostly abandoned technologies that people used before the industrial age and also technologies that were used in non agricultural societies. I have a hunch that some of these technologies will again become relevant in a more resource-poor future.
If you want to contact me directly, you can reach me at: my first name followed by nomadic at gmail dot com